Windows
by amberpire
Summary: There's nothing to light up anymore. ;Cat/Jade; Onesided.


**Disclaimer:** _Victorious does not belong to me in any shape or form._

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She's not going to jump.

Cat tells herself this over and over with each step that carries her to the edge. She's never been afraid of falling, it's the climb that worries her. She leans against the edge, her hands splayed against the cold concrete and it's damp from the recent rain and it still smells like it, like the water just fell and her red hair is wet from dancing in it. Cat likes the rain. She likes the way it drenches her, drowns her, she likes the way she can swim and still breathe.

She peers down at the street below her. It's empty and illuminated with the sick, washed out glow of an orange streetlamp that flickers occasionally, struggling to stay on. Her eyes hook on it, watch as the light blinks on and off, sometimes burning brightly and other times only a low pulse and she feels like that, like that streetlamp. Sometimes she's bright and sometimes she's dim and the time between is so brief that she always feels exhausted and overrun and flickering; just barely there.

She doesn't remember quite how she found this building. She had just been wandering as she so often does with no direction and no sense of mind, she put all of her faith in her feet and let them take her wherever they felt like going. Cat's always fancied the idea of fate, that things happen for a reason, and other times she can't stay focused long enough to think much of anything. Her mind frustrates her. Her train - or a dozen trains - of thought makes it hard to stay on task, to remain lucid. She hates it. It's like having a hundred televisions in your head all at once and they're all on different channels and you have to try and watch them all at the same time. That's how she feels, like there's so much going on and she has to try and catch every detail, and before she knows it she's veered far off from where she started. Half the time she doesn't know how she gets from point A to point B but her feet always take her somewhere.

They brought her to the rough side of Hollywood. She didn't realize it for several minutes, humming along happily in the rain, twirling. She's making up a song in her head, a whole symphony, and bobbing her head to an imagined beat. It isn't until the bars on the windows of the houses catches her attention and she thinks that's a very odd way to keep the sun out until she realizes with a jolt of swallowed fear that it isn't the sun the bars are trying to keep out.

She had spotted a group of people moving her way and usually Cat isn't afraid of others, but the way their voices sounded so sharp even from a distance scared her. She was okay when she was with her friends, but alone ... alone, Cat was just Cat, and true to the name of the felines she's nicknamed for, she's skittish, and so she ducked under a leaning fence and ran.

The first thought that crossed her mind when she saw the building was that it was terribly ugly, but swiftly afterward she thought it was kind of cute, in an old man kind of way. As she climbed the fire escape, she thought about how houses were like people; some were sagging and old and had angry blinds for eyelids and others were small with flowers in the windowsills. Some had big windows where you could see everything. Some had no windows at all.

Cat has a lot of windows, she thinks. She can't stop what she's going to say, she simply says it, lets it blurt out without a second thought. Without a first thought, even. She just doesn't have the filter that everyone else has, the filter that says "this is inappropriate" or "this doesn't make sense." Because, to her, anything can make sense if you think about it long enough. She's good at that. She lets everyone in, lets everyone see everything without really thinking about it. Her windows are wide and open.

Jade always tells her she thinks too much, twists things up, mixes them. When no one is around, she says she likes that about her. She smiles and laughs at Cat's imagination. Jade doesn't have a lot of windows. The few she has are shrouded in thick blinds. Or bars.

She's still leaning over the edge, humming. She hums loud and hard against her lips until they vibrate and then she peels them back and lets her voice roll out of her throat in one long note until the back of her lungs meets the front and she has to clutch the edge as she inhales shakily. Her eyes narrow down at the road below her. She's two stories up.

She's not going to jump. But she'll climb.

Cat props a foot up on the edge of the roof and hoists herself up. Her arms spread wide for balance and she feels like a bird for a moment, head tilted up to the groggy sky. She takes a deep breath through her nose, the smell of the rain filling her lungs and then coming out again. She likes the idea that she could be made up of the rain, or the flickering streetlamp, or a house with too many windows. She'd rather be any of those things, actually. Anything but human.

She's afraid to close her eyes. Every time she does she sees the same image over and over and it's driving her crazy - crazier than she already is. Her lack of sanity has never been a question to her or to anyone, really, but even she can feel like things are going out of control. But eventually her eyes start to strain and her eyelids squeeze closed and there it is, burning itself into her corneas.

Jade slipping from the stage and cupping Beck's cheek and kissing him the way she'll never kiss her.

Cat's eyes fly open again, a strangled sob sticking in her throat. She doesn't understand why she wants to be Beck so badly, but she does - she has for a long time now. She wants Jade to look at her the way she does to Beck, she wants to feel her lips against her mouth. She wants to know what it feels like to be Beck, to be able to wrap his arms around Jade's waist and kiss her and tell her that he loves her and to hold her hand and brush his fingers through her hair and whisper things in her ear in the dark.

Cat cries.

She doesn't remember when it started. From the moment she met Jade, the girl has always been nicer to her than to most other people. She's softer with her, kinder, more ... gentle, like Cat was a time bomb about to burst. Cat's used to treatment like that. People have always been wary of her mental state, kept their guard up, watched their step around her. But Jade ... Jade is different. Jade's careful, but she pushes Cat, too. She's become Cat's best friend, the first person to ever look past her shocking red hair and crazy words and frantic train of thought and tried to find something more stable, more sure. Because Cat's never been sure, she's never been certain about anything - not her friends, not her talent, not her brain, but Jade ... Jade, she's been sure of since she first saw her. Jade lets her see inside of her windows; she pulls back the blinds for her and that makes Cat's heart swell.

Cat glances at the streetlamp as it goes out. She whines. "No, please, please." It has to turn back on. It can't give up. It can't go out just because things are hard. That's cheating, that's coping out, that's taking the easy way. She almost melts when it slowly burns back to a full brightness, swallowing hard.

If it could do it, so could she.

It was torture and the greatest pleasure, being around Jade. Jade made her feel safe and special; all of the other girls were so petrified of her that they stopped picking on Cat in the hallway. They stopped calling her a loon, stopped writing nasty messages to her and slipping them in her locker, stopped glaring at her as they crossed paths. Cat never really paid much attention to it because if she ignored something than it wasn't really happening, but as soon as it stopped Cat noticed how much ... happier she was. Every moment with Jade was euphoria; every laugh she managed to squeeze out of the girl, every hug she could steal, every sleepover where Jade's chest always rested so nicely against her back.

It burned something in Cat. It made her light brigther.

And when she was with Jade, those moments when it was just her and the brunette, it was like Beck didn't exist. He was just some made-up figment of her crazy imagination. When Beck wasn't there, it wasn't so hard to pretend that she had simply made him up. Jade laughed with her, peeled back layers Cat didn't know were there, let her be stupid and immature without yelling at her. It was nice, it was new, and before Cat knew it, she was in love.

She knows she's not normal, she knows she doesn't function like everyone else, but she knows what love is. She knows that when Jade brushes her arm and her body ignites that that's love, and when Jade perks a studded eyebrow at her in a way she reserves only for the redhead and sends Cat's heart into a seizing frenzy that that's love, and when she feels broken and lonely she can always go to Jade's arms for support, that that's love.

But Jade has Beck. She doesn't want Cat that way. She doesn't want to touch her, to kiss her, to love her. She sees Cat as a friend, and that's all Cat will ever be. A friend. A best friend at the most, but never a lover.

It makes her light grow dim.

She stares in earnest at the streetlamp, wishing and crying and praying to whatever entity created her that it won't go out. It can't go out. She needs that light, it's the only thing guiding her along the way, stumbling blind. Just like she needs Jade. She needs her to function, to be happy, to get out of bed, because before Jade she was alone and it wasn't until she found a friend that she realized just how closed off she had been. Those few moments when Jade threw her a sincere smile, when she pulled Cat's hair behind her ears, when she draped an arm in sleep over her waist - those were the ones holding Cat together, keeping the strings from snapping.

Every time Beck fell into the scene, it was almost jarring to the red-haired girl; didn't she make him up? Wasn't he not real? But as soon as Jade melted into his arms reality slapped Cat with more pain than any physical blow could ever give her. He is real, and he's with Jade, and she's with him, and it's killing her. It's killing her every time she watches Jade trace her fingers up Beck's arm, every time she turns to him for comfort before Cat, every time Jade's lips arrest Beck's in a possessive gesture that Cat knows she'll never experience.

Cat will never be Jade's.

Cat turns her eyes down to the street. Two stories. She didn't come here to jump, but now the fear of falling doesn't seem so daunting. Maybe it'll be fun; the rush, the wind, the rain, the sidewalk. She closes her eyes and plays it over in her head, her falling, tumbling, humming down to her death. The idea doesn't bother her as much as one would hope. The last thing she would see was this barred up brick building. Or maybe she'd close her eyes and see Jade smiling at her from across the bed. But what if Beck crept in? What if he and Jade kissing was the last thing she ever saw?

She'd be one unhappy ghost, she supposes.

Cat opens her eyes and turns to the streetlamp. It's dying out again, growing dim, the orange light retreating as its source struggles to keep burning. But it can't, it flickers and struggles and Cat turns her head back to the street below her. She starts humming again.

Maybe she will jump. Maybe she won't. All she knows is that she's tired of this, of living watching the person she loves love someone else. It's tearing her up. It's breaking away what little sanity she has into little pieces and turning them to dust. Her skin burns with all of the times Jade hasn't touched her, all of the places she'll never touch or see or kiss or love. Cat lifts her hands above her head. Sprinkling raindrops meet her fingertips.

Maybe she's all burned up. Her windows are closing. There's nothing to light up anymore.

Cat takes a deep breath.

The streetlamp dies.

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**A/N: **_I know you're all thinking that this can't be it, but it is. This is my angsty oneshot for you. It's a bit of a different style for me, but it came out in one big rush and I had to get it out._

_Now, you should review. It would make a certain person I know very happy. That person being me. _


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